Child Walking and Crawling Up Stairs: Plate 480 from Animal Locomotion (1887
Eadweard J. Muybridge
American, born England. 1830–1904
1884-86
A collotype photograph from Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion series that records a child’s successive steps up a flight of stairs to study and visually analyze human movement.
It reads like a photographic flipbook—rows of tight, freeze-frame images show the child’s shifting weight and limb positions against a lined backdrop, so tiny changes in posture become vividly legible.
Muybridge’s sequential studies broke motion into measurable moments, helping to establish scientific methods for studying locomotion and paving the way for the invention of motion pictures.
Medium
Collotype
Dimensions
5 1/8 × 17 15/16" (13 × 45.6 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum
Accession
182.1937
Palette
Exhibitions
